It’s at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys. – Emil Zatopek. Sure, it’s true for females, too.
You know how slow the go can be looking through old photographs. This last box of archival material gonna take weeks. Think I might be enjoying myself. I look at a copy of Running magazine from Winter 1979 – think January, not December – and I can say, this ain’t so bad.
Most of it’s pretty good, even the letter from the guy who thought the previous issue was bad. “…Resist the temptation to put in low-information filler articles.” Which butted up against another letter; “Running is in a class by itself because you have so much that is pragmatic and practical.” They were probably both right.
Here’s an outtake by Herman M. Frankel, M.D. Dr. Frankel, who passed away last year, completed the 1978 Boston Marathon in three hours and 41 minutes. 3:41. He was exactly middle-aged at the time.
I googled ‘pain-free marathons’ just to see what images popped up. Zatopek’s was not one of them.
“It is not necessary to smile and make a wonderful impression on the judges,” he said, deflecting his trademark grimace.
Pain-Free Marathons by Herman M. Frankel, M.D.
There are more ways to run marathons than there are people who run them. The “caldron of pain” experience, so vividly described by Dr. George Sheehan (Sports Illustrated, April 17, 1978) is only one approach, one which many runners choose to repeat over and over again.
Another kind of drug-free ecstacy is available, pain-free and injury-free, to those who make the simple decision to run at the same peaceful pace on marathon day as they do during their daily runs. Like other long-distance runners, they also typically find that their running habit provides them with a rich variety of health benefits (feeling relaxed, alert, energetic, patient, sleeping and eating well) and medical benefits (heart, lungs, blood vessels, metabolism, digestion), and with the opportunity of learning how to detect, understand, respect, and act upon the fascinating and important messages coming from themselves.
This is, in fact, the heart of this approach: listen to what your body is telling you and use the information thoughtfully, on marathon day as well as on all other days. At the very start, it’s a good idea to get a complete physical checkup, to make sure you don’t have any unsuspected abnormalities which might make unsupervised exercise difficult or dangerous, such as anemias, or irregular heartbeat during exertion.
Then, use the following guidelines (“the six 20’s”), adjusting the details daily in accordance with any evidence of overstress (pains; persistent aches; colds, fever blisters, canker sores, or other signs of infection; feeling washed out, fatigued, or irritable):
(a) Do a variety of gentle stretching, strengthening, and relaxing exercises once or twice a day, about 20 minutes each time, maybe more.
(b) Beginning with a 20-minute walk on the first day, increase your exercise load very gradually over the course of about 20 months (perhaps fewer, perhaps more), generally planning a relatively easy (or short) day (or two) after each relatively hard (or long) day.
(c) Keep almost all of your running gentle (conversational pace), with a 5-minute walk at the start and at the end, and with walking breaks inserted whenever you need them during your run. Do about 1/20 of your total running at a faster pace, without any sudden jerky speeding up or slowing down. You can do this by estimating the number of minutes you’ll be running altogether that day, and including three separate stretches of slightly fast running, each lasting that number of seconds.
(d) You’ll be ready to run an ecstatic, pain-free marathon when you can comfortably cover 20 times the marathon distance (20 x 26.2 = 524 miles) over the course of the two months before marathon day, the total including:
(e) five 20-mile runs, each of which leaves you feeling good enough to enjoy a normal, easy run the next day.
(f) Practice drinking during your long runs. Stop to drink about every 20 minutes, and take a total of at least 20 ounces per hour when running in warm weather. (Water is fine: rely on the natural foods in your diet to replace the minerals lost in sweat.)
Seasoned marathoners might well choose Boston for their first pain-free, peak-experience marathon. The ecstacy of interacting with the 26.2 miles of supportive, appreciative, caring people of all colors, ages. sizes and shapes from Hopkinton to the Pru at this year’s Boston Marathon left me feeling that if we runners enriched their lives at all, it was small repayment for the selfless, warm-hearted, generous, loving way in which they enriched ours.
Others might seek – and are likely to find – similar experiences by preparing for, and running in, a marathon close to home, even if there won’t be over a million enthusiastic people in attendance.
If you choose to make use of it, the opportunity will be there for a glorious, uplifting experience, without pain, without injury.
You can expect the warm feelings to persist the next day, when you do your regular, easy run, and for a long time thereafter.
I’ll be honest, I never trained the Dr. Frankel Way.
But then again, I don’t remember a pain-free marathon either. – JDW